The present invention concerns delivering diagnostic services to a client and pertains particularly to the resolution of incidents arising in the course of those diagnostic procedures.
During the execution of a computer software program on a computing system, faults or other unexpected conditions are sometimes encountered. Certain classes of conditions may be anticipated by the computer software program itself and so appropriate corrective action can be taken. However, there is another class of faults that the computer software program cannot anticipate--usually a condition arising from the interaction in unexpected ways of the computer software program with the operating environment in which the computer software program is run. When this occurs, the user of the computer system can become dissatisfied with the business impact of the fault. The client or a help desk analyst then reports the fault to the vendor's customer support organization--or to the customer support organization of the vendor of a related hardware or software product.
Sometimes the vendor who receives the technical support call is unable to resolve the client's problem. One reason that the vendor may be unable to resolve the problem is that insufficient symptoms were reported by the client. Another reason could be that the problem--although appearing to the client to be caused by the vendor's product--is, in fact, caused by the product interacting with a related product. The related product is often produced by a different vendor.
Communication between the client and the vendors is generally done over the telephone or via electronic mail. Subsequent communication between/among multiple vendors is done via telephone, electronic mail, or electronic transactions directly between the vendors' technical support applications. When technical support applications electronically transfer information about an incident, it is generally necessary for the sending technical support application and the receiving technical support application to use a translator module that performs the translations between the internal application formats used by each vendor. In some cases an intermediate transaction format will have been defined that is acceptable to the interacting technical support applications. Although industry standards exist for the exchange of support information, only a few help desk and technical support center application packages have been extended to implement the standards, therefore few vendors currently have this capability.
Application programs are available to help vendors track reported incidents and for determining the source of faults. Examples of such application programs include, the Clarify ClearSupport application program, available from Clarify Inc., having a business address of 2125 O'Nel Drive, San Jose, Calif. 95131, the Vantive Support application program available from Vantive Corporation having a business address of 2455 Augustine Drive, Santa Clara, Calif. 95054, and the Remedy Action Request System application program available from Remedy Corporation having a business address of 1505 Salado Drive, Mountain View, Calif. 94043. Also there are end-user applications that are, in fact, diagnostic packages that enable a client to analyze and attempt to repair their own PC: The Oil Change utility program and the Active Help Center FirstAid Internet extension, both available from Cybermedia, Inc., which has a business address of 3000 Ocean Park Blvd., Ste. 2001, Santa Monica, Calif. 90405. These application programs provide automatic service and support software that automatically detect, diagnose and repair most common problems that occur on personal computers which are running the Windows 95 operating system available from Microsoft Corporation, having a business address at 16011 NE 36th Way, Redmond, Wash. 98073-9717. These application programs, however, do not capture the fault description and diagnostic analysis within a trouble ticket package.